Mystery Cults

Mystery Cults

in antiquity, secret cults of certain divinities. Only the initiated, or mystae, participated in the cults, which consisted of a series of sequential dramatized actions illustrating the myths associated with the worshiped divinities. The dramatizations were accompanied by a particular ritual and usually by processions, incantations, and orgies.

Mystery cults were engendered by the cults of the most ancient gods, who personified death and rebirth in nature. When class society developed, some cults broke away from official religion and became secret cults. The first mystery cults grew out of ancient Oriental rituals (the cults of Osiris and Isis in Egypt and Tammuz in Babylon). There is evidence suggesting the existence of mystery cults in ancient Greece from the seventh century B.C.

Among the best known of the early mystery cults are the Eleusinian mysteries in honor of the fertility goddess Demeter and her daughter, Persephone (Kore); the Orphic mysteries, which, according to tradition, were founded by Orpheus, a mythical Thracian bard; and the Samothracian mysteries, which honored the Cabiri, patrons of seafarers. Archaeological evidence suggests that a number of Oriental mystery cults, including those of Isis, Attis, Cybele, and Mithra (Mithras), were introduced into Italy as early as the second century B.C. Near Pompeii archaeologists have excavated the Villa of Mysteries, which has a central room containing unique representations of the practices of mystery cults. Many elements of the mystery cults of late antiquity, particularly those of Isis and Mithra, were borrowed by Christianity and became an integral part of Christian religious services.

To be sure, by using Eisner's ritual-centered visuality to refer to the ritual-sensitive viewing and framing that allows the viewer to see the divine in the conceptual framework of mystery cult, we are taking it out of its original context--its conceptual birth place being the cultural milieu of the Second Sophistic and the scopic regimes of the pilgrim Pausanias in his periegetic travelling and of Lucians viewer in Dea Syria (Eisner 2007, 1-26).

The mystery cult, meanwhile, was a distinctively Mediterranean form of religious worship, a cult within a cult, as it were, in which esoteric beliefs withheld from the general populace were taught and secret rites performed.

They include several new versions of the Bible - "Solomon had 300 wives and several hundred porcupines", "Moses led the Hebrew slaves to the Red Sea, where they made unleavened bread which is bread made without any ingredients" and "Christianity was just another mystery cult until Jesus was born".

The rich image we get of early Christianity is that of "a mystery cult in which same-sex love was not only idealized, [but] was an integral element of its oldest rite," a hint of which can still be located in the unexplained verses in the gospel of Mark, in which a "certain young man [neaniskos] was following [Jesus], wearing nothing but a linen cloth," who flees naked just as Jesus was being captured in the garden of Gethsemane.

The gallery statement refers to the "absence" and "emptiness" in these spaces, but one wonders if Thurber isn't trying to capture a latent fullness, defined by the practice of what has become, for many contemporary urban humans in the West, a new religion or mystery cult, in which the therapist's office is virtually a shrine.

The brutal sacrifice of another (animal or human) during the secret ritual of a mystery cult become the moral self-sacrifice of a person's own desires, but even more than that, the responsibility of sacrificing oneself for another, the ultimate gift of death.

By the Hellenistic period, the three mystery cult sites at Eleusis, Samothrace, and Thebes had all expanded and developed into large temple complexes, mirroring the general layout and geography of the ancient city, polis.

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